Be Careful What You Subpoena. It May Turn Up More Than You'd Like People To Know

from the oops dept

Remember the VC firm, EDF Ventures, which brought a lot more attention to a negative review on the website TheFunded.com by sending a subpoena to find out who wrote the negative review? Well, it turns out the decision keeps getting worse and worse. VentureBeat has the details that were turned up by the subpoena -- and the result is more details of the criticism, but no identifying information of the poster. Since TheFunded allows parts of comments to be public, with other parts designated as "members only," the subpoena has now made the "members only" content public, and it trashes the deal terms offered by the firm and criticizes a partner who has no operating experience. Also, the details suggest that this wasn't a spurned entrepreneur, but an adviser or partner in some manner. Either way, beyond drawing more attention to a negative review, now the firm has made public even more critical info.

You get what you deserve

Imposed Anonymity

It's interesting the lengths to which they have gone to keep users anonymous even to the site owners. The user does not have an email address - which also means no ability to recover from a lost password. No information is saved from the user's membership application. No email address, no IP address. Payment information is not saved, so there no tie back to credit card information.

The one potential stumbling block - the date and time of the post are saved, which could be tied back to generic server logs which contain the user's IP address. Although I'd have to guess those logs are not saved.

A refreshing change from sites such as Google, Amazon, or eBay which track and record every move made by the user and tie it back to personally identifiable information.